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I have seen very credible evidence that Greta Thunberg is responsible, you know how she hates fossil fuels It makes sense and she lives close to the pipe

I canceled all my classes and ran all the way home to beat you!

Maybe riding the Jungle Cruise attraction at Disneyland in the early 70's left an indelible impression on my wee mind.

Don't worry, it only gets worse after the "dreaded Half Century" mark... enjoy the ride towards it

The next big DLC for Solasta has been announced, including level increase to 16: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2100431/Solasta_Crown_of_the_Magister__Palace_of_Ice/

Biennial "still alive" check in time, is it? Still alive here, although my Tween is likely to finish me off at some point. Feeling my age. Much love, Tess x

I think if you wanted to make Take the Hit into a pseudo-taunt like effect, it could be done. Generally my experience is that enemies will prioritize damage dealers (e.g., bring a priest and Eder to the first construct + revenant fight in the cave. Have priest use Radiance, watch all of the revenants come for you) and targets with low defenses/low hp. Unfortunately AI is extremely conservative about risking disengagement attacks and will almost never try to break engagement just by walking (will still use Leap, Escape etc.) even if the disengagement attack doesn't hurt at all. So if you wanted a taunt effect for Take the Hit it might look like: -50 deflection and +10 (or some other ludicrous number) engagement for the fighter +50 deflection for nearby allies, but they cannot engage

opposite. am always interested in what young people as individuals think. having an opportunity to get university aged kids away from social media and challenge/speak to 'em is a privilege. am the first to roll our eyes at some o' the abject and willful ignorance we see when generalizing the younger generations. am also disappointed by the continuing deterioration o' basic learning and research skills 'mongst those barely old enough to drink legal. as such, feel free to chalk us up as a cranky ol' cripple w/o any guilt. nevertheless, am more optimistic 'bout young persons than those o' us born before the firstest moon landing. is the kids who still believe they may change the world, so they is the only folks who may eventual do so. am rare regretting the chance to interact with young, privileged and unappreciative snowflakes just so long as am able to communicate with 'em face-to-face. have taught a couple classes since retirement. have also taken a couple university courses. w/o school we would probable end up in cranky ol' cripple jail... though am suspecting such involuntary incarceration would take a year or two as 'posed to days. HA! Good Fun!

Over the holidays we were gifted an 8-pod hydroponic grower: FIRINER Herb Garden Hydroponics Growing System - 8 Pods Indoor Gardening System with LED Grow Light, Plants Germination Kit with Pump System Automatic Timer, Adjustable(19.6") Ideal Gifts for Women (amazon.com) (ideal for women? wtf?) and one recent drunken night we decided to set it up. We bought seed packets and set up basil x3, cilantro x 2 and Beefsteak tomato x 3 and Im happy to report that all but one cilantro has sprouted! But I also had a lot of leftover seeds so I drunkenly wandered around the house placing Beefsteak tomato seeds into a bunch of other various potted plants my wife has around the house. Loe and behold! 10 more Beefsteak tomato plants have sprouted in those planters too! So I guess Ill try to corner the market on Beefsteak tomatos. *It makes me lol to say Beefsteak tomato.

Dang you! Now that theme song has earwormed me!

...sweet Jebus, Bok; that be one helluva machine...buildin' a new rig meself, but nuthin' anywheres near that hefty: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F ASUS TUF Gaming 3070 ti V2 32 GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5 6000 Seasonic Vertex GX-1200 1 TB Western Digital Black SN850X (OS drive) 2 TB Kingston KC3000 (Gamin' & crap drive) 500 GB Western Digital Black SN770 (the wife's drive fer all her Crafting shyte an' the 999,000 pictures she takes daily, mostly o' the new dog) ...a few other odds & ends jus' ta make 'er glow...gonna 'ave a dual monitor setup; got the ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQ secondary monitor already, but the one I wants fer me primary gamin' monitor ain't out yet, hopefully early April...jus' reusin' me ol' Fractal Design Define R6 USB-C chassis; still luvs that ol' girl... ...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

I know its not the case in SA, but whenever I think if Africa, my mind instantly conjures the image of being on the African Queen, riding down some river, dense jungle to either side, was that a rustling in the bushes!?, suddenly darts are whistling through the air crossing the deck from both sides!, arrows and spears make a thud as they stick into the deckhouse!, in the distance...an ever present sound of drums. Fade to black.

https://cepa.org/article/gloom-envelops-putins-tv-propagandists/ This is a definite " BruceVC must read " link about the doom and gloom that is settling into various Russian propagandists like Solovyov and again they create this false narrative that they fighting NATO when in fact they fighting Ukrainians who are fighting and dying for the right to decide their own destiny

Disciplined Barrage is self-only. That's a pretty big difference. Of course not for Solo. LoH can save your life, Displined Barrage cannot. Initially I was comparing 1 concentration with LoH base healing effect, which I think is in favor of the later by a pretty big margin. But we're really comparing apples and tomatoes here. It also heals more than any instant healing abilities bar LoPZ and consumables. Actually, it's the Healing over Time that heals the most per tick. It's really middle ground between instant heals (life savers) and heals over time (damages mitigators), with the big distinctive feature from instant ones of benefitting from INT and PL duration scaling. It also has nice interaction with Wall of Draining for being a "short but strong" buff. As they are many source of DPS. Disciplined Barrage is precious because there aren't that many souces of crits though. Brilliant has the same effect on SC barb as in Vanilla. All this requires ability points. SC and MC get almost the same numbers, even if it is obvious that they are spent less optimally for having a single tree (especially since some Tier 1-7 passive are really broken). It's hard to figure what MC feature could beat Driving Roar in term of convenient cheap AoE DPS + fast cast Interrupt/push. And it terms of Spike AoE, dual mortar HoF is there too. Not everything works every fight. Blood Surge works well vs Belranga and to some extant vs Hauni O Whe (because Blood Thirst make Barb optimal for dealing with those parasite oozes), but require some Chanter skellies slaying to work a bit vs Dorudugan (and probably not a very optimal strategy then). Anyway, SC Barbs are seen as fine by most, so I won't change them, unless some other reviews argue about it. As said above "SC Barbs are fine" does not reflect only my opinion. This was even said before BPM, and I still buffed them. Parties require less balanced build in general. Noticeably, you don't have to tank or do the healing yourself. If healing 1/2 to 1/3 of health pool for 1 zeal is very very meh for you... well I don't know what you need. As said above, apart for consumable, I don't know what can beat it apart things that restore ~10 base health per 3s. Sure it heals more overall, but it is really slow. If we're talking about healing efficiency, IMHO nothing can top Nature's Balm. I start every druid battle by casting it, it is so fast, can affect the whole party (initial placement matters). Pain Link and Spiritual Ally (!) are also my bread and butter heals for their efficiency again. But when a character is dangerously low on health, LoH becomes better at "saving one's life" than the mentionned abilities (not to mention it can be stacked with said Robust). I guess for Solo, you have to think a lot about long term and attrition, which makes it "very very meh" instead of "basically okay", which it is in the general gameplay. Anyway, since we have more or less agreed on GLoH and HoL I propose to stop arguing here (you can answer but I don't guarantee responding). Actually I think I'll go with 30 health per 3s for 5s (instead of 6s as said above) for HoL/GLoH in order to harmonize duration with Shielbearer secondary effect (which is 5s in BPM). But I'll go with 15s Robust and 20s Courageous instead. So same level of power as described above. Also now I'm turning my attention on a final point before release (I hope) : Take the Hit. It is supposed to be the pinacle of "tanking" (in term of deviating attacks from others), but it is limited to damages transfer. Even with BPM change (no recovery, no cost), I find it hard to pick and cast (some combos do exist). Thematically, you're getting damages on your fighter in exchange for protecting your friends. The issue is that the said friends have usually lower defenses, so transfering damages make easy damages vs your supposed tank. It worked somewhat better in Vanilla since Unbending was overhealing there dues its weird implementation. So these excessive healing could be dumped with Take the Hit cast, even if the synergy didn't work. Take the Hit would be perfect if there was a way to make 50% of the attacks actually target the fighter in order to benefit from its defense. I must emphasize that there are no way to do that. The ability that redirect attack have they targets hard coded (Reflect stuff, Blade Turning). You all can make design suggestions, but remember not everything exists. So try to replicate an existing ability/effect. My proposal would be : - Take the Hit grants 50% damages resistance to allies in the AoE - Take the Hit transfers 50% stacking bonus damages to fighter for each protected ally. This can be mitigated by Unbending of course, which is a better synergy than the current effect. Also stacking defenses make these bonus damages less easy to take advantages of. The basic idea is to enable the fighter to protect what has passed their line of defense. Thematically, it fits remarkably well with Furrante's Breastplate passive (-10% allies damages, +10% to self)... which also has Take the Hit as castable effect. Duration, Recovery and Cost should be adjusted. Cost can't be zero in this case, so probably back to 1 Discipline. Duration should be relatively low. Could be 10s as original. Could be down to 6s if the effect feels too powerful. Recovery / no Recovery is also a question : I admit I fear having a backrow fighter casting Take the Hit repeatedly (even worse with a "Brilliant" Tactician), so at least recovery would prevent them from doing much else. Nope, they are not supposed to stack. Both are from active effects.

<Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan>SARGY'S ALIVE?!?!?!</Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan>

Challenge of 5 Gauntlets (2018) - I'm back for another film from Pennsylvanian schlock auteur Len Kabasinski. A desperate father of a daughter who fell ill with a mysterious sickness that no modern medicine can cure turns to an archaeologist/martial arts master to track down a mythical relic that purportedly has the power to heal. He must defeat 5 keepers tasked with protecting the relic which leads him on a globetrotting adventure. By "globetrotting" I mean Pennsylvania dressed up to look like foreign lands. Of the 4 Len Kabasinski movies I've seen, this is the only one where he plays the lead. In the other 3 movies of his that I've seen he was either a villain or just had a cameo. For better or worse, this is the most competent movie of his I've seen. The cinematography was clearly done by someone who knew what they were doing (there is a bit of shaky cam, but it's used very sparingly) and the sound mixing is solid throughout (something I can't say for some of his earlier works). There are also very very few terrible digital effects, again, for better or worse. This movie also has Leo Fong, known to RLM watchers as "Low Blow". The movie's relative competence does deprive the viewer of some of the humor of Len's older terrible movies. It's by no means good, but it's not bad enough to be hilarious, unfortunately. There are some decent fight scenes, though, all things considered.

So looking forward to Starfield. And this teaser did have a HUGE reveal critically important to me: the game can be played in third-person! Pay attention, Obsidian devs!!!!

Hehe, even Lavrov has stated, that the Ukrainian lead to Nordstream sabotage is bull**** https://t.me/bbbreaking/150102 Puting the tinfoil hat up, this resembles typical Russian psyop, to blame the western media as incompetent liars, in the case that someone finds out, that the sabotage was really the work of Russia

Wasn't even that bad compared to games that keep getting passes, like anything and everything Bethesda Game Studios puts out. Imho the main issue was that they released it on previous gen consoles, once that became clear the meme-train just left station and kept on choo-choo-ing. For radiation, a combination of the correct artifacts combined with good gear is how I remember dealing with that. The last few areas were really rough I recall, with enemies with rocket launchers and snipers galore. Comparatively the NPP wasn't that bad, heh. All in all SoC (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in general, really) was pretty (euro)yank. For one, it was kinda unfinished, most annoying example was that your gear would wear out, but there was no way to repair it...meaning you'd have to save up the best gear for the hardest locations, and often lug around multiple sets of things so you could toss the broken ones (only to find out the AI is actually smart enough to recognize that your almost-broken armour was better than their stuff so they started wearing it, making your life more difficult ) The second issue was the difficulty slider. The game actually gets easier on harder difficulties as it increases damage to both the player as well as the enemy pretty much equally, so clearing out locations stealthily becomes a lot more viable all of a sudden as you can now one-hit enemies much earlier in the game (but conversely, if you get caught out, yer toast)... And then there was the little issue that you only get access to the real fun toys once past the point of no return. But that's, iirc, an issue all three games suffer to an extent. Aaaand, now I want to start another SoC playthrough, with a repair mod Last time I tried I used an addon that should have fixed some of the major issues (like repair), but retaining the original game's balance, while upgrading the graphics, but it also stealthily nerfed early parts of the game (which I explicitly did not want, eg. the first group of bandits didn't have shotguns any more, making that mission so much easier than it used to be it wasn't even fun)

Kept watching s3 of Stargate SG-1. I completely forgot that every other planet is covered in canadian forest.

As I suspected, it is a purely display bug, the effective healing values are normal (tested at list Might, Practiced Healer, Mercy chant) It happens with attacks within status within attack within... etc. Just too complex for the UI to handle perfectly. I have no idea why, and display issues are not my priority when I don't know how to correct them easily.

Georgina Beyer, the world's first openly transsexual MP. Prior to that was mayor of a pretty conservative rural town. Instrumental while in parliament to establishing civil unions and getting our prostitution laws out of the stone age- a law that was expected to fail by a decent margin. Gave a fantastic speech that changed a lot of people's minds and was good enough to get an abstention out of the only muslim MP (it passed by one vote, via that abstention).

Finished off the space heater build with some final upgrades for the year. This combo is so power hungry it's stupid, CPU and GPU pushing 400w+ each when maxed out. Reminds me of the triple SLI days... Intel i9 13900KF @ 6GHz Zotac RTX 4090 @ 3GHz Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master 32GB G.Skill TridentZ5 DDR5 6400 2x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB Gen 4 NVMe Corsair RM1000e Hyte Y60 case 48” Gigabyte FO48U OLED

Takahiro Kimura